Honestly, I’ve always been surprised as to why YouTube even tolerates adblockers. It’s basically a no-brainer for them to bake ads into the stream and disable skipping
Because it’s impossible to block adblocking. The server can’t know whether the client plays the video. The best they could do is have you wait the ad-time even if the ad is blocked but that would just mess with their analytics - they want to be sure the ad is being watched.
The only reason adblock blocking works for smaller websites is because adblockers need to catch up with each implementation. People will easily catch up with Youtube as there are thousands of people working on Youtube programming.
I think the commenters intention was that YouTube could stream you the video with embedded ads. They would have to stream the content though and skipping ahead would have to be guarded serverside by some clever checks on if you received (and therefore likely seen) the section of the video with the ads.
What probably speaks against this is that it would significantly increase their costs, since they couldn’t cache as easily anymore and always need “clever” services/servers along the way. A dumb CDN wouldn’t cut it anymore.
I fear it’s still just a question of when it’s either cheap enough for Google to do it or when the expected returns are high enough to offset the increased costs.
The clever check is impossible. The server can’t know the client is showing the video even when playing DRM content. I could literally mute the sound and put a black box over the ad until it’s over. The problem is as old as the internet itself.
That’s why Apple and Meta pushing eye tracking so hard. It’s the only solution to the ad blocking problem.
I think YT is doing well with YT premium and that’s the way to go for them. It’s one of my favorite subscriptions and I’d probably stick around even if they raise the price unless they hurt the creators so badly they bounce and I’d bounce with them.
